COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY OWEN JONES IN THE GUARDIAN
"The intolerable
pressures placed on our girls and boys are resulting in shockingly high levels
of mental health problems'
It might sound concerned to say things like that, but such
words I believe are in fact largely inaccurate and needlessly hurtful.
As just one example of what I mean, in the 1940s and 1950s –
and perhaps continuing even later - professional therapists and psychiatrists
were telling people that schizophrenia was the result of overly-dominant
mothering.
You can imagine how many thousands of families had pain and
guilt dropped into their lives by professionals, no less, on top of the
terrible pain of having an incurably schizophrenic son.
And there is a long history of such quackery around mental
health.
It continues today among those who blame social conditions
for mental illnesses.
Virtually all genuine mental health problems – from simple
anxiety to the extreme psychoses – are determined by genetic make-up, and the truth
is even science today is incapable of dealing with them in any really effective
way.
We have some medications, but they at best suppress symptoms
and in a number of cases are fairly ineffective.
The truth is that we still do not know enough to correct
what is wrong in such minds, much as we do not know what triggers so many
diseases and faulty conditions in other, less complex organs of the body than
the brain.
We do know that most people can go through quite terrible
situations – from WWII or the Holocaust – and, though pained and unhappy,
remain pretty much fully functioning.
The mind is truly that resilient for most. Were it not, society would
have come to a halt long ago.
